Thinking out loud about the problems of still using Discord in 2025.

Thinking out loud about the problems of still using Discord in 2025.
https://paragraph.xyz/@dfern.eth/the-communication-paradox

Software Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems. B4: Stanford EE / Illinois ECE

The truth hurts to read

"By continuing to rely primarily on centralized platforms, the Ethereum community risks undermining its own message. Each time a developer chooses Discord over Matrix, or Twitter over Farcaster, they tacitly signal that the advantages of centralized systems outweigh the values of decentralization."

Because I don't see the dynamic changing anytime soon

/ethereum foundation | opinions are my own but more than likely they come from Vitalik's blog paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

It's no surprise discord is the revealed preference over matrix, matrix sucks. The ceo of element also spends more time justifying bad decisions on hacker news rather than actually responding to criticism by fixing the problems, like when home servers could add devices on behalf of users and subvert E2EE but this is "good, actually™️"

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

First, I wasn't aware of the egomaniac CEO. It looks like some security researchers found some valid problems and they seem to have patched them now [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/matrix-patches-vulnerabilities-that-completely-subvert-e2ee-guarantees/]. I agree it's incredibly poor form. It's human nature to be defensive, but as someone building privacy tools, you need to be able to take a beat & be magnanimous and grateful to anyone who is looking over your code, even if you don't think everything they found is an "Unbreak Now!" priority bug. That being said, my Bayesian prior for P(egomaniac | opensource CEO) = 0.80, I was going to list some names, but it would probably be shorter to list who isn't one. 1/N

The primary reason I mentioned Matrix is because Protocol Labs uses it, and I respect PL & they are a big org, so that was pretty much it. I don't care for a lot of the vibes around Matrix, namely, they've vibe-aligned themselves with being anti-crypto (🚩🚩🚩) (see https://matrix.org/blog/2022/09/27/announcing-third-room-tech-preview-1/#:~:text=cryptocurrencies,NFTs ) similar to other formerly-cypherpunk nonprofits (EFF most notably)...and even though I'm a Status fanboy, Status is still a bit too rough to have a mandate to browbeat people to switch. I try to separate the "art from the artist" so I'd like to think Matrix is at least somewhat better than paying for a Slack license from Salesforce. 2/N

SimpleX doesn’t fix traffic analysis as a vector, fwiw, so lack of user IDs don’t really matter

I totally forgot about Telegram in my original article, but I would have recommended Signal/SimpleX as a replacement (even though SimpleX has problems as @cassie has noted before: https://warpcast.com/cassie/0x80e1477e), because generally, I think of these apps as 'group chat apps' (even though Telegram does have a mode for channels subdivisions). Matrix was built as an alternative to Slack, and Discord is pretty much gamer-Slack, so that's why I group them together. Now Slack is cringe & dead and MS Teams is feasting on its remains.

I'm also open to the idea that Matrix is too much like Mastodon and not worth even being a stepping stone, in other words the benefits of 'federation' are not worth the squeeze. It may be too home-server-tied-down (no support for Self-Soverign Identity) in a way technologies built on did's/verifiable credentials like ATProto are not. 4/N

At one point Status was using Matrix, and they actually switched to Discord, until their recent 2.0 launch, where they have actually axed the Discord down to a single backup-support channel. They actually did use it like a stepping stone. I don't see ETH R&D even considering using anything other than Discord & Telegram (I exempt the forums from this, BitcoinTalk-esque serve a different social role entirely from social-media-esque-chat). So even if we consider Matrix to be not worth the effort: consider DarkFi's DarkIRC, I'm not even a DarkFi user...but Slack at one point was just an IRC wrapper...Google Talk & Facebook Messenger were *both* XMPP protocols and they both turned off XMPP to centralize (Same thing happened to RSS post FB News Feed)...we are literally regressing from IRC to "Lotus Notes with gamer-themed-dark-mode"...because somehow we've decided dank emoji packs are the most important feature for critical communications infrastructure. 5/N

I don't see ETH R&D even thinking about the problem of VCs & KOLs on Twitter setting the tone for the project. I'm not going to beat around the bush: the horrorshow phenomenon of Max Resnik was purely a Twitter creation and never should have happened. Even Max admits he conflict-baited to increase engagement for Twitter's algo. Rather than Twitter being a medium for cryptomedia to disseminate out into the real world, the arrow has now reversed and VCs & KOLs on cryptotwitter now set the tone for podcasts. Actual cypherpunks shouldn't have to be competing for airtime with pump & dumpers. I wasn't around for early crypto-reddit but IIRC, a similar thing happened with r/Bitcoin, where big-blockers were banned & censored, which I believe became one of the instigating events to create Ethereum. I get that advocating for a different platform might just introduce a new set of KOLs, this accusation is often lobbed in FC's direction, but at least it won't be resident on Elon's Personal Server Farm. 6/6